Company Box

Company box

I recently incorporated in the U.S using Clerky. The entire process is online. You just click some buttons, and boom. Your company is incorporated.

AI keeps advancing. Building stuff gets cheaper and easier. The difference between 2021 and 2025 feels like zero-to-one. Massive difference.

Intelligence is valuable. It makes sense to use the best AI and hire the best people.

Using an AI is quite transactional. Input and output tokens cost energy. You pay for tokens to get text/image/video output.

Is hiring transactional? If the company is too big, hiring tens of thousands of people, yes, I think it will inevitably be. Quantifiable work is exchanged with some quantity of money.

The perfect team

The goal is clear and everyone loves working on the same goal. The team is small, highly focused, aligned, and incentivised to work. Everyone wants to win. Not “against” anyone, but “for” the goal.

I think Pavel Durov achieved this with his Telegram team. The way he hires is through competitions, which is interesting. It is also interesting that he owns 100% of Telegram.

“If you try to manage this system manually, without automation, you will probably end up hiring tens of thousands of people. But if you rely on algoritms, and the team is forced to put together algorithms in order to manage it, then it becomes much more scalable, much more efficient, and interestingly, much more reliable as well. (Pavel Durov)

Company box

This is an experimental thought.

Let’s say you have a project idea. Vending machine that serves soup. A café that only serves one perfect dish. A shop that makes very high quality t-shirts. It could be a completely new thing, or an existing thing but beautifully different.

You don’t have the experience to build this yourself, but you have good taste for it as a consumer. You don’t know how to make yoghurt, but you have a strong taste: know when it tastes good.

Let’s clear this up. Gourmets may not know how to make food but the best gourmets can count the ingredients and can even correctly predict the amounts of the ingredients.

High taste alone makes you a gourmet, but with a skilled cook you can create the best food.

So, what is a company box?

Have an idea, fund the project. Let it run.

When a project is “funded”, can it interest enthusiasts? I believe yes. Money is a good motivator, but also, there is no price tag for curiosity / genuine interest that comes from within.

It should be set up in a way that the company box deployer wouldn’t even spend two hours per week. It would run itself. So that one can deploy infinite company boxes.

Currently I have no company boxes running. Running one would teach me many lessons.

Non-profit

Once you have profitable boxes, you can also run a box without having a profitability purpose.

You can make a living research paper. Let researchers research, let’s say about how “sleep” works, and share their findings publicly.

You can make a waqf. Serve something free to use. Ottoman birdhouses. Whatever you like. It could be something so small, and so well done.

Idea or talent?

The idea itself can be valuable, but without anyone ever working on it, it’s worthless. Talent is valuable, but if there is no project to work on, it is worthless too.

Company boxes connect great talent with a great idea to work on.

Is it similar to VC?

Yes, and more similarly, in Y Combinator they have “Requests for Startups”: “RFS is our tradition of sharing ideas we’d like to see founders tackle.”

So, they kind of say “if you do anything related to the list of ideas below, it is more likely we will fund your project”.

Can this work?

I don’t know, but it’s worth trying.